Monthly Archives: December 2007
Foreign Policy Goes Glam
Increasingly, celebrities are taking an active interest in political causes. Are they actually making a difference? No doubt that celebrities can raise the profile of issues near and dear to their hearts. But highlighting a problem is not the same thing as solving it—on that score, the celebrity track record at affecting policy outcomes is the same as the rest of us: mixed.
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Let’s Talk About Love
Is disdain for Céline Dion innate or learned? Is our love or hatred of My Heart Will Go On the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment? Or is it something less exalted?
Carl Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,†that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores.
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How a UNICEF Photo Makes the West’s Heart Ache
This photo of 11-year old child bride sitting next to her 40-year old fiance captures a small, everyday moment that wouldn't surprise anyone in the Taliban. But to Western eyes it is quite a different matter. Dutch writer Leon de Winter:
Our eyes behold an abomination. Our eyes have learned to see the world from the perspective of a slowly acquired sense for humanity. And although more and more voices tell us that we -- the former colonialists and imperialists -- have lost the right to judge other cultures, we know just as well as this girl that this marriage is wrong.
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David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists and Megastars
David Byrne's describes 6 music distribution models, each offering various levels of artistic control.
The totally DIY model is certainly not for everyone — but that's the point. Now there's choice.What I like about this piece is how David Byrnes defines music, and that by doing so expands the idea that it is just a piece of plastic meant to be bought, sold, traded and replayed endlessly in any context.
We'll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only "our kind of people" can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs.
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Twilight of the Books
We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago. Caleb Crain reacts to The National Endowment of the Arts (N.E.A.) recent report on American reading patterns that connects declines in reading with civic, social, and economic implications and asks what society might be like if only a few elite people read literary texts as a hobby.
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Medical Myths
Heard the one about using only 10% of our brains? Not true. Doctors pour cold water on this and 6 other medical myths in the British Medical Journal. These myths were based on ideas the authors had heard endorsed on several occasions, and which many physicians thought were true.
But after we carefully lay out medical evidence, they are very willing to accept that these beliefs are actually false.
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The Polarization of Extremes
Cass Sunstein argues that the ability to filter information on the internet is going to lead to a world of fractured communications, group polarizations, cascades of false information, finally resulting in a rise in extremism. It's a relief to hear arguments that do not see the internet as an ideal force for democracy, but his argument relies on "perfect filtering," without any explanation for how this is even possible.
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A Hunger For Books
Doris Lessing has been a lifelong advocate from freedom, democracy and human decency. So it is a little disheartening that in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature she has not interpreted some of the big cultural changes in the context of technology, such as diversity, lifelong learning, participation and citizenship.
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A DNA Driven World
Geneticist Craig Venter:
...the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence. Whether or not designer microbes that replace coal and oil are part of the solution, such disruptive ideas and technologies that let us adapt to and mitigate climate change are. We need a scientifically literate society willing to embrace change. But here's the problem:
Science is a topic which can cause people to turn off their brains. I contend that science has failed to excite more people for at least two reasons: it is frequently taught poorly, often as rote memorization of complex facts and data, and it is antithetical to our visceral-driven way we live and interact with our world. Our planet is facing almost insurmountable problems, problems that governments on their own clearly can't fix.
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Why don’t we love science fiction?
Why do so many of us see science fiction as hopelessly adolescent?
The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario,Brain Aldiss has said, implying that makes SF redundant. Isn't this--at the heart of our anxieties--just where this genre excels?
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